Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday April 25, 2012 @01:54PM
from the when-our-powers-combine dept.

MikeatWired writes "Google will tightly integrate its new Google Drive online storage service with an upcoming version of its Chrome OS operating system, says Sundar Pichai, who oversees development of the company's Chrome products as well as its Google Apps online services. Chrome OS is Google's effort to move all applications and data onto the web (and its Chrome browser), but the OS still hasn't mastered the art of moving files from place to place. By integrating Chrome OS with Google Drive — the online storage service Google introduced on Tuesday — the company seeks to correct this problem. 'With Chromebooks, [Google Drive] is even more powerful,' Pichai says, 'because it just starts working naturally. Your local drive is also Google Drive. This makes it really powerful because you just don't think about it.' Basically, Google Drive — a service that operates on the web — will perform as if it was the local file system. If you open the 'save file' dialog box on Chrome OS, for instance, the system will take you straight to Google Drive. 'We'll effectively integrate [Google] Drive into the native file system of Chrome OS,' says Scott Johnson, Google's Google Drive product manager. 'All the core OS functionality will use [Google] Drive as a place to store data — if that's what you opt in to.'"

“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content

So if you write a manuscript for a movie on chrome OS then you are giving permission to google to make it into a movie if they want. Amazing.

Does this mean you also can't store on your G-drive anything you don't have permission to reproduce. For example, if I am reviewing a manuscript an I place it on my Gdrive then I've given permission to Google to reproduce it. Yet I don't have that permission to grant.

Please submit me all of your personal files, tax returns, pictures of ex girlfriends and open your webcam. This is so that I can program my OCR to work better. Promise!

You have no use for my data that benefits me, you have no track record of good behavior, and you have noting to lose by abusing the information I give you. None of those things are true of Google.

Google has a long track record of taking good care of my data. Not perfect, but on balance much better than any other company I have dealt with. Never recording any data anywhere would be "safer", in the same way that never leaving my house would make it less likely that I would contract an illness. Google has

If you think that's the only implication, then I think you're a bit naiive.

If you're concerned about your IP, you shouldn't use cloud storage.

Microsoft's SkyDrive terms aren't a lot different

* You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.*

If you think that's the only implication, then I think you're a bit naiive.

If you're concerned about your IP, you shouldn't use cloud storage.

Microsoft's SkyDrive terms aren't a lot different

* You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.*

I think the last line makes it significantly different than the Google EULA.

Because their standard license (which is what this is) also covers youtube, etc.

If Google goes bankrupt, then this license may end up being the only thing protecting your data. I don't think that they are doing this maliciously and I do think that if enough people protest that will fix it, but I don't think it should just be dismissed by saying "oh; they promised not to be evil". If you think Google can't go bankrupt, please remember that five years ago Microsoft also looked completely invulnerable. Almost nobody could imagine them not being dominant in personal computing. Things l

is in place, and it does not specifically exclude the interactions between Chrome and Google Drive that are the topic of this thread, then Google is free to do what the agreement says. It doesn't matter that "They have to have those permissions for things like OCR and image search to work.". It only matters what the agreement says. (Notwithstanding any supervening law, of course.)

The TOS is for all Google services. It limits itself with a clause that follows that the GP decided to omit.

The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).”

As well as this clause:

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

The performance clause is almost certainly for other services besides Google Drive like YouTube.

That still doesn't cut it. By putting something on their system I have to give them rights to "perform" the work? As in YouTube? But I just want to store that video of my and the Missus doing the nasty, not let it be posted on YouTube. And NOT have it be posted on a 'Future Service' know as Google Porn that they developed subsequent to my posting it.

Of course, I never store anything I value or want kept personal in the cloud. No, this will be one Google service that I'll not be using.

That still doesn't cut it. By putting something on their system I have to give them rights to "perform" the work? As in YouTube? But I just want to store that video [...] not let it be posted on YouTube.

The terms of service expressly note that the user has further power to control the use of content on particular services via settings on those services. While perhaps that could be highlighted more, I can't see any reasonable way of reading that that doesn't commit Google to respect those settings when they

Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content

The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).”

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

The clauses go hand in hand. Yes, you maintain ownership because you are not assigning all of your rights to Google when you upload a file. The problem comes with the overly broad grant of a license from you (as owner) to Google (as licensee). The limiting language used by Google is not enough to ensure that you do not intend to give them permission to make your otherwise private material public in ways you hadn't anticipated.

Google does not need to own your IP to do (almost) anything it wants with your mat

The performance clause is almost certainly for other services besides Google Drive like YouTube.

It is also for services like Docs/Drive that, like YouTube, allow sharing content and which, like YouTube, allow something that might be construed as "performing" the content. (E.g., showing of Docs presentations.)

Note that the terms of service both expressly recognizes that the user retains ownership of content and expressly references user control of content through "settings" in particular Services.

Does this mean you also can't store on your G-drive anything you don't have permission to reproduce.

Given that putting a file on Google Drive -- or any similar cloud-based storage system -- involves taking a file for which you have a local copy and reproducing it remotely (potentially multiple times), that should be fairly obvious.

For example, if I am reviewing a manuscript an I place it on my Gdrive then I've given permission to Google to reproduce it.

What's your point? They can't infringe your rights because by using the service you gave them a license to use it however they want. If you didn't own the copyright or have the right to issue the license, then it will infringe upon the third party that owns the material, but never you, the user.

Except for material we may license to you, Apple does not claim ownership of the materials and/or Content you submit or make available on the Service. However, by submitting or posting such Content on areas of the Service that are accessible by the public or other users with whom you consent to share such Content, you grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available, without any compensation or obligation to you.

Which sounds pretty reasonable. The problem comes earlier in the "agreement,"

Apple reserves the right to take steps Apple believes are reasonably necessary or appropriate to enforce and/or verify compliance with any part of this Agreement. You acknowledge and agree that Apple may, without liability to you, access, use, preserve and/or disclose your Account information and Content to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or a third party,

So the "agreement" grants Apple privileges to spy on your data and pass it along to any unspecified "third party" or their choice, if they feel like you might be doing something they dislike. I read it; I didn't sign it. I don't think anyone should.

This sounds like a very very very bad idea, no way can it be as stupid as it sounds.

This means that if I put anything that is copyrighted on the google drive I could then be prosecuted for distributing copyrighted material, and google would also be liable since they then claim license over the files I uploaded.

And no, I did not think that Google's management nor it's lawyers would be stupid enough to do what was posted they were doing.

Hmmm, I really should RTFA now rather than respond to what you posted, but what the hell, why not?

Make sure that you have the necessary rights to grant us this licence for any content you submit to our Services.

Ok, so taking in what you posted still does not get them out of hot water, and still keeps me in hot water. Just because I was lax in not getting a license before I stored mp3's n such that does not excuse google from not having a

Ok, so taking in what you posted still does not get them out of hot water, and still keeps me in hot water. Just because I was lax in not getting a license before I stored mp3's n such that does not excuse google from not having a license for files on their service.

Luckily for you that's not mentioned in the article;-) However, in this case, provided that they follow procedures which Google already has in place due to all it's other services, they are covered by the DMCA and similar legislation. All they have to do is to remove the content when the content owner notifies them that it's copied without a license and you fail to give a counter notice. There are very few jurisdictions nowadays where an online service is liable for the misbehaviour of their users pro

They try to back up in the next paragraph, but it's clear they still get full permission to do anything (emphasis added):

The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).

As a professional web developer, I'm staying far, far away. God help you if you ever upload source code to a product they like.

You absolute muppet. They clearly state you retain all rights to your own intellectual property which you upload to Google. They can not take your code and use it. As a professional web developer, you can't read for shit.

Way to cherry-pick. Quite literally, the very next sentence in the ToS reads:

"The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps)."

What's even worse is this was the very next sentence in the article you quoted from.

"The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).”"

"Developing new services" could just as well mean making something to search everyone's personal files on the public Internet. "Promoting services" could mean plastering your family photos on the side of a bus. Even if Google doesn't do any of that, there is nothing stopping them from selling/bankrupting and someone else using the data under the same license. OP is not trolling.

“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content

Dropbox's and Skydrive's terms are more sane.

Dropbox's, yes, Skydrive is basically the same. And, as another poster pointed out, if you read Google's whole ToS, it self-limits the purposes for which it can use that license to something more reasonable.

However, if you prefer to get different terms from Google, there's a really easy way to do it: Set up your own domain on Google Apps. According to this page [google.com] you then fall under the Apps Terms of Service [google.com], which are what Google offers to its business customers. Those terms say "what's yours is yours,

You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.... In order to operate and provide the service, we collect certain information about you. As part of the service, we may also automatically upload information about your computer, your use of the service, and service performance.... We may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications.

Dropbox:

We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction. This includes product features visible to you, for example, image thumbnails or document previews. It also includes design choices we make to technically administer our Services, for example, how we redundantly backup data to keep it safe. You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services. This permission also extends to trusted third parties we work with to provide the Services, for example Amazon, which provides our storage space.

Google:

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

Things could be better worded all around... but that's what you get when lawyers get involved.

Stereotypical area of failure for networked home dirs is one user account can have more than one device.I see it at home everyday with my AFS home directories and bizarre behavior when two machines logged in at the same time try to run awesome and firefox at the same time.Not saying GOOG drive will/must fail this way, but I'm sure many GOOG-drive API using devs won't think of it and will find a way to fail, its the hardest problem not mentioned in the article.On an optimistic note, I have a couple android devices now and they all live under the same google account perfectly.

I had two computers running a mail program that synced with gmail. They each had scripts running that sorted the mail into folders slightly differently. I frequently would find 200 copies of the same message in the trash when I left both computers running.

I've got a similar setup at home. I've got my basic OpenAFS home directory as a starting point, but I finally got things to work fairly well by a combination of a KDEHOME that points to a machine local filesystem and symlinks out of the networked directory to the machine local filesystem.

It seems like every release has another service that assumes every home directory is a local hard drive and everybody needs to run background services that can't properly share files in their home directories. (Like a "pers

I think the problem is that the "Home" directory concept was originally based around single-system access to the directory (ie,/usr/home/foo was accessed on a single machine) and where file locking, IPC and other similar mechanisms prevented multiple logins accessing mail from trashing files. The Wintel PC world's view of it has largely been as a private personal directory on shared storage, not generally as a user profile directory although MS kind of makes that work (for some definitions of roaming prof

I guess if you are in middle- or high-school, this could be a nice service for storing your homework and such. But if you are a business, or your files need to stay confidential for some other reason? I don't think Google Drive can be trusted with that kind of material. Even if it is encrypted or such. Just saying...

Why? I dunno about you, but I never signed any contracts while in middle- or high-school restricting what I can and cannot do with my homework. Maybe you can't distribute the problems themselves, as they're probably copyright (though you could argue fair use for educational purposes and such,) but otherwise there's no reason you couldn't.

Hell, even in college I never signed such an agreement. Was asked to once and I refused, along with around a third of the class. SOP in those situations is to assign a diff

Under fair use exception for educational purposes I could quote most of, or maybe all of, your post, and there is very little you can do about it. As long as I avoid plagiarism by properly attributing your post to "Urza9814 (883915)" then I'm pretty much all good. Anyone can sue anyone for anything, but its really hard to win a lawsuit against a properly documented quote in an assigned school essay.

If I stored your post on GOOG-Drive and the Mighty GOOG decided to make a feature film out of your post, it

Stop cherry-picking parts of the ToS that appear to back up your claim. You missed out the part where they say what's yours remains yours. But as that would make your argument disappear, and stop you from being able to feel smug with yourself that you're better than Google, I doubt you'd have intentionally left that in there.

Hm. I would not use Google Drive, until there was a FUSE driver available for it. Once that was available, I would upload one or more LUKS containers which would contain my files. I'm pretty certain that the work required to break the crypto of one of those containers is not worth the knowledge that you'd get by inspecting the contents.

Oh, yeah. And, if Google can unlock your crypto, you need to remember to *not* upload the private key! (Tell your paymasters that you just got pwnd.)

I guess if you are in middle- or high-school, this could be a nice service for storing your homework and such. But if you are a business, or your files need to stay confidential for some other reason? I don't think Google Drive can be trusted with that kind of material.

If you are a business, Google probably expects you to use Drive through Google Apps which has a different set of assurances and terms of services (even in the free version.)

What if you are not connected to the internet constantly? does this make your device worthless? How does one work 'offline'?

You use the locally-cached version of the files. That's what "your local drive is also Google Drive" means. It means that, just as with the Google Drive app for MacOS or Windows, your Google Drive has a local copy.

For apps, you use Chrome's app installation features to make offline-available web apps. So, both your files and the apps you use to work with them are available locally when

Your google laptop can't do anything..... not even access your files. This has happened just twice at home, but seems to happen a LOT at work and in hotels. I'd rather have local dh0: copies of my programs and files, so I can work while offline,

"This makes it really powerful because you just don't think about it". This is a pretty good summary of the way in which companies such as Google make their profit.
These days, it is quite essential to "think about it".

If there was a driver that would encrypt/decrypt the traffic en route then maybe I'd store stuff in the free version. Then I could share the key w/ my work PC or a co-worker or whoever I want to grant access to the files.

Google is brilliant at getting us to turn over information to them. If I store a file it is for MY use, not theirs. Especially if I have a paid account, then using the data to spam me w/ ads is even worse.

FYI - I was trying to get an answer on this one and found this reference. A Google gears Widget present in Chrome will synchronize your drive for offline viewing.http://www.karthikk.net/2012/04/how-to-access-google-drive-without-internet-on-your-windows-or-mac-machine-google-drive-howto/

Although I'm still trying to figure out why I'm letting other people's insecurity affect my judgement on the purpose of cloud storage and the value of free.

I guess that answers the speculations, whether you will be able to use Google Drive with Linux:
Unless google brakes the openness of ChromeOS, yes. And as long as they don't forbid crypt, that works for me

I wonder how the google drive will be synched with the local drive, as the storage limit for cloud drive access, is definately smaller than the hdd we have on the computers we use today. I wonder how they will incorporate a sort of limit watcher to let you know even though you can save it locally , you have obtained your limit in your google drive account.